Ethereum on Course to Settle $8 Trillion This Year

Ethereum has processed $4 trillion worth of transactions in the first half of 2021 with it set to clear $8 trillion transactions this year for the first time.

According to blockchain analytics from Messari, ethereum saw a 3x increase in the first quarter, settling $1.5 trillion in transactions, up from $570 billion in Q4 2020.

The second quarter saw a further increase with $2.5 trillion transactions processed as pictured above, making that a new record.

Ethereum is now settling about $3.3 billion a day, way up from circa $300 million in early 2020.

Bitcoin however handles far more at $16.4 billion a day, with this naturally varying daily based on blockchain transfers, but current levels are more the usual ones rather than flukes.

Unlike for BCH which apparently has seen 78% of its total supply move in the past 24 hours. That’s not necessarily 78% of all coins as you can endlessly transfer the same coin, but based on these data we can safely guess there’s maybe some spamming going on in BCH, although not necessarily because cheap fees can lead to more usage.

While for eth, we can see a lot of the activity is real because the median transaction value is zero. That’s due to the majority of transactions being smart contract transfers or potentially token transfers which show as zero eth on the surface, because it’s either a token or the ‘code’ is transferring and so you need to look at internal transactions to see the actual value.

Doge is also transferring more than eth at some $8.4 billion in the past 24 hours, but here again there’s 35% of the supply moving, while for eth it’s 1.5%. However them shibas may well be up to something.

As we’re dealing with blockchain data, there’s lot of qualifiers but during the first and second quarter of the year, eth fees were very high reaching at points more than $100 for a Uniswap transaction.

That means it is very unlikely anyone was sending eth around just to game these stats. Instead there was a huge amount of activity which we can now quantify as being $4 trillion, more than the GDP of Germany.

Those volumes are also not far off from overtaking Visa’s $11 trillion transfers last year if ethereum settlements keep up with the first half.

That would be a significant milestone for this barely five years old cryptocurrency which has now grown into an entire financial ecosystem.

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